Grading a paper, assignment, or test (hereinafter generally referred to as “test”) is an essential part of the duties and responsibilities of a teacher, professor, and/or teaching assistant. Many teachers spend a considerable amount of time grading tests. Accordingly, any tool enabling a teacher to grade tests more quickly and efficiently, without sacrificing grading quality, would be extremely desirable to teachers.
To that end, writing instruments that count and display the number of marks a teacher makes on a surface are generally known. Such instruments are available with both mechanical and electronic counting mechanisms. Further, these instruments generally provide a reset function whereby a teacher can reset the counter to zero upon completion of a particular student's test. Typically, a teacher uses one of these instruments to count the number of marks he or she makes on a particular student's test. The teacher can mark correct answers on a particular student's test, thereby creating a tally of correct answers with the writing instrument. Alternatively, the teacher can mark incorrect answers, thereby creating a tally of incorrect answers with the instrument. Using either method of tallying points, the teacher still is left with a raw number of either correct or incorrect answers. The teacher then has to calculate a grade using the raw number and the total number of points available on the test, which often is based on the number of questions and/or number of problems for the particular test. Such grade calculation for each student's test can add a significant amount of time to the overall grading process.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have a writing instrument that is able to calculate a grade for a student's test rather than simply tallying a number of points for correct or incorrect answers, as available writing instruments do.